Smile
by joiede
Summary: It rains when she cries. HayamaSana.


Smile

It's strange seeing them together. Sana's eyes itch at the sight. She clears her throat, the sound of her voice barely registering as her own, "So how long have you two been dating?"

Fuuka's hand skims across the table to grip Hayama's unresponsive fingers into her own. Sana tries not to stare. Something dangerous is building in her stomach, and she finds it increasingly difficult to breathe. Unblinkingly, she wills herself to keep her line of sight on Fuuka's forehead. Her bangs, to be exact-- newly-trimmed and parted to perfection.

Hayama is watching her. Sana pretends not to notice.

Fuuka's hair grazes her shoulders as she speaks, catching the light of the classroom in the soft waves of her dark locks. 'Since the beginning of the month,' Fuuka chats animatedly, eyes bright with nervous enthusiasm, 'Akito is such a girl. Did you know I had to ask him? Who ever heard of a female asking the guy out? Ah, seriously…'

Sana could feel her mind blurring up—maybe sprouting peach fuzz where her common sense should've been.

'_He likes you, you know_,' Naozumi had told her, cutting her off when she tried to protest, '_It's not as if I would care about something like that but…_' Nao looked so sad, then. '_But you like him too, don't you?_'

Don't you?

Fuuka is babbling, and her words mesh together in little fragments through Sana's ears. She has trouble listening. What's more-- she was having trouble breathing properly. In fact, Sana didn't think she was breathing at all.

Someone's hand is resting on her knee.

The contact causes little shivers to crawl down to the tips of her toes. Instinctively, she tries to brush it off. Only, it doesn't go away. In fact, it does the opposite of go away. It envelopes her fingers in a bruising grip, swallowing her own hand with the entirety of its embrace.

Fuuka is still talking.

Hayama isn't looking at her anymore, His eyes are dark, and shrouded beneath the unruly mess of his bangs. Sana's gaze shifts to his left hand, lying limply beneath the clutch of his girlfriend's.

His other hand tightens its grip on Sana's fingers.

'_The two-timing buffoon_.' Sana thinks. In her mind, she bombards him ten times with a rubber mallet. Sana hears herself speaking before she even knows what she's saying, "I'm really happy for you guys. You go well together, I think. Like green tea and coffee cream"

_Smile, Sana, smile._

She smiles. It is one of her illustrious catalogue grins— the kind that shows off the pearly whites of her teeth and forces her cheeks to the bottoms of her eyes. It's her million-dollar smile, the one that sells toothpaste and acne scrub. The one that makes lovestruck teenage boys swarm her omnipresent billboards, spraying blood from their nostrils when they gaze up at the brown orbs of her inflated pupils.

Sana is smiling-- and Hayama doesn't believe her. She could tell by the way his eyebrows knit for the slightest particle of a second

She pretends not to notice.

"At least, you _would_ be cute together if Hayama didn't look so constipated all the time. It'd be nice to pull that stick out of your butt now, eh Hayama? You'd look a lot cuter if you went to the bathroom once in a while, so you don't explode, ne?"

Sana gives his fingers a friendly squeeze-- the platonic symbol of a connection between two friends. Good friends.

But nothing more.

Hayama drops her hand, and something inside her cracks a little bit.

xx

She hasn't talked to him in days.

But she looks at him, sometimes, and hopes he doesn't notice. Sana likes to look at him and study the way he slumps idly against his locker, the ever-present emotionless mug painted on his face.

It makes her want to go over and hit him. 'Stand up straight, gorilla!' she'd scold him, whacking the slump of his back with her mathbook. 'You think you look cool, with a hunch in your back, hunchback? It's cool to look like an old man, old man?'

Sana imagines his response, too. He would gaze at her through half-lidded eyes, pretending not to listen but secretly amused none-the-less.

She isn't quite ready for a confrontation yet, though—which explains why she feels compelled to duck into the nearest bathroom when she spots him coming down the hallway.

Pressing her forehead against the cool glass of the mirror, she wonders if he'll be able to recognize her if she wraps herself in toilet paper.

_Roar. Like a mummy._

Someone interrupts her thoughts.

"Why are you wrapping your head in toilet paper?"

The voice is male—and all too familiar. Sana's startled to find him in the bathroom with her. It takes a while for the queer situation to click in her brain.

"Hayama, what are you doing in the girls' bathroom?"

Wordlessly, he points to the row of what Sana could only describe as 'fountain-thingies' against the wall.

"…Oh."

_Well shoot._

She speaks again. "I guess that explains why that weird kid came in a couple seconds ago and got a nosebleed. I hope he found another bathroom."

No response. He seems bored. Then again, Hayama was seems bored.

She adds, superfluously, "Or at least a bucket to dunk his head in. There was a lot of blood. It was spraying out of his nose. Like confetti."

He looks like he wants to say something. Sana waits.

Instead, he does the logical thing, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her out of the boys' restroom.

"Next time, check the sign on the door, Sana."

This statement troubles her. Not because it's implying she doesn't know how to read a door, but because he says this so coldly, because he can't even look her in the eye anymore… because….because…

Well, she can't quite put a finger on it. Hayama walks away before she can get a single word out.

When he had gone, she realizes it was the only time he'd ever used her first name.

_Sana._

It's strange and foreign, coming from his mouth. Childishly, she finds her temper inflating. She doesn't like it. At all.

_Sana._

It's the wrong name, and he's not supposed to call her that. He's supposed to say, 'Next time, check the sign on the door, baka. It's a man, see that, idiot? Soup-for-brains. Can't you read a picture, Kurata?'

There's a needle pricking the soft underbelly of her throat. She swallows it down.

_I don't hate you._

_Yeah, right._

She watches his back disappear down the hallway.

xx

It's her birthday today. She doesn't know whether to be sad or relieved when nobody remembers.

Not even him.

The air was thick with the promise of an oncoming storm. She loses her notes to the wind when she trips over her feet near the bike cages. _Maybe the sky is angry, too._

_Maybe_, Sana thinks, _I control the weather with my temper_. That's why it always understands her so well-- the ubiquitous field of blue being obscured by giant patches of sullen, black clouds.

Then again, if the weather truly corresponds with her emotions, it should be raining.

When the final bell sounds, Sana is more than ready to leave the premises. She looks forward to going home, burying her face in a giant pillow and eating mounds of ice cream cake until the insides of her stomach burst. As soon as she completes her cleaning duties, Sana plans to latch onto the bumper of someone's tow truck and hitchhike all the way back to the comfort of her lovely house.

She is considerably peeved when the note on her desk tells her to do otherwise.

_Kurata,_

_Meet me at the south wing, next to the supplies room._

_I have extra duties to assign you._

_-Sensei._

With imaginary wisps of piqued smoke leaking from her ears, Sana makes her way to the south wing, trying to push away the evil mental images of her sensei being electrocuted into paralysis by a fateful flash of lightening.

Kneeling beside the supplies room, Sana closes her eyes and tilts her face towards the vast plain of storm clouds. Her sensei is so slow. Why isn't he here yet?

_Ninety nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nice bottles of beer…_

She's down to eighty-eight when she finally hears the sound of footsteps breaking against the gravel. Sana opens her mouth to greet her teacher, and within the next millisecond, she finds herself sprawled across the ground in a daze, a caustic pain throbbing against the back of her head.

There is a pressure against the side of her skull, and she realizes with a start that someone's pressing their shoe against her face. With her cheek digging painfully into the gravel, Sana hopes the owner of this foot didn't step on anything disgusting wearing this shoe….

"You're pretty dumb. I can't believe you actually listened to that note." The shoe-person speaks. It's a girl. An older girl. Sana tries to catch a glimpse of the perpetrator—an action that requires her to move her head, a feat that proves impossible at her current position. She squints up to the blurred form.

The shoe-girl continues, "I have to give you props though, brainwashing Naozumi-kun into taking you as a girlfriend. What did you do to him, you little whore?"

Squirming uncomfortably, Sana is nothing short of confused. "Naozumi…?"

Psycho shoe-girl is yelling now, "Stop pretending! I know who you are! I don't even know what he sees in you, ugly slut!"

It takes Sana a moment to realize why Shoe-Girl is so angry, but when it clicks, she can't stop the laughs that spill from her cracked lips.

"You're talking about the rumors, right? It's funny, because Nao and I aren't dating. The tabloids made it up--"

A sudden kick to her gut knocks the wind from her lungs, and prevents her from continuing. Sana feels her lips moving in a silent explanation _It's not like that. We're friends. I love someone else. I love someone else. I love…._

Her face isn't smushed up against those tiny little rocks anymore, but the sharp kicks delving into her sides aren't making the situation any lighter.

Psycho Shoe-Girl is screaming again. Sana wonders why Naozumi's fans all seem to be mental patient escapees. _I hope my fans aren't this weird and screech-y…._

The Shoe-Girl is also being quite verbally abusive. Sana isn't sure if she appreciates it.

"Ugly Wench! I should bash your face in! You think he loves you? You're not even good enough for him, ugly bitch!"

In spite of the situation, Sana finds herself getting increasingly annoyed with her continuous use of the word 'ugly.'

"You know," Sana tells the girl, raising her voice in a subconscious manner, "This isn't going to make him like you any better."

Silence. For a miniscule of time, Sana lets herself pretend that the girl has come to her senses, and that the light drops of rain are actually sugar particles descending from the darkness of the clouds. A message from the sky. _Don't cry, Sana. It's all good now…_

Sana raises her head, and something strikes her cheek. Hard. The sky is rumbling, but she could barely hear anything through the ringing of her ears.

Dark, crimson flecks are sprinkled across the gravel. It dimly reminds Sana of the cherry frosting Mama used on top of her birthday cake: _Happy Birthday, to my beautiful daughter. Please eat until your stomach turns round and bulges with overuse._ The warmth of her kitchen seems so far away now.

Tentatively, she touches her face, and her fingers are immediately in glossed over in a thick layer of warm liquid. Tasting metal in her mouth, Sana finds herself wondering if she'd ever be able to eat her stupid cake. Probably not.

_They'll have to feed me through a tubey-thing._

How unattractive. Well, at least there'd be flowers—preferably sunflowers. Or maybe tulips. She isn't picky.

Shoe-girl has a rock in her hand. It's tipped in scarlet, but Sana tricks herself into thinking it isn't actually her blood. The girl raises the rock again, and Sana follows it as it comes down, letting her eyes flutter shut in preparation for the inevitable.

She could feel herself trembling as the fist clenching inside her gut bursts into her throat.

Her mind is blank, because she thinks it'd lessen the impact. Sana tries to picture what the inside of her head would look like, and hopes the janitors don't have too much of a hard time scraping her brains off the gravel.

_Ew, I have a gross imagination._

A moment passes.

_This girl is sure taking a long time to kill me…_

Sana flinches as something cold touches her cheek.

"Fangirls are fucking irritating, aren't they?"

Sana knows who it is, even without opening her eyes. When she does, her first course of action is to stare up at the stony boy with an irritated glare, taking note of the psycho shoe-girl's unconscious form that's knocked cold beside them.

Hayama just looks down at her.

"What took you so long?" Her voice cracks at the end.

He doesn't show any visible change in expression, and something inside her throat breaks at his unconcern.

It's raining, and she's glad he won't have to see her eyes leaking tears like a ruptured water faucet. She is such a stupid girl. And she probably looks ridiculous, like a drowning pigeon.

He doesn't say anything, but he touches her face again. His fingers are like ice cubes, unbearably raw against the burning skin of her cheek. He traces them across the length of her jawline, before finally cupping her face in the whole of his palm.

She's scared to look at him, but kneels in front of him nevertheless, wrapping her arms against his waist and pressing her forehead against the warmth of his stomach.

"I really hate you sometimes, you know," she tells him. He probably can't even hear her anyway.

The material of her shirt is clinging uncomfortably to the dewiness of her arms, and judging by the inexorable shivers wracking her body, it was clear that she'd have to endure a fever for the next couple days.

When he speaks, his voice is hoarse. "Stupid girl. I can't believe you fell for that note."

She's angry at first, but then her lips curve into a smile. Not the pretty kind she uses for catalogue modeling, where she forces dimples into her cheeks and strains to exaggerate the size of her eyes—but the other kind, the one that makes her look like a silly little girl. She's smiling against his shirt, teeth pressing against the fabric. His buttons dig uncomfortably into her forehead, but she doesn't think she cares.

"Happy birthday, Kurata."

After the rain stops, they walk home together, fingers laced hand in hand. This time, he doesn't let go.

FIN


End file.
